Scientific Research Meets Spiritual Pursuits in Pilgrimage Study

Who says that science cannot mix with the spiritual? Prof. Harris
is planning to study the physiological effects of a 30-day pilgrimage
to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on a team of William and Mary
students.

The project is a collaboration between the professor and his
student, senior Michelle Wolf, who has won the support of the
Borgenicht Program for Aging Studies and Exercise Science, which helped
the team obtain devices such as heart-rate monitors and pedometers that
were needed to get the project going. Funding also has been offered by
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Summer Research Fellowship and the
American Physiological Society Summer Research Fellowship. The study
was possible only with the assistance of George Greenia, professor of
modern languages and literatures, who organized the pilgrimage for
students.

The project's main focus is the relationship between changes in
cardiovascular disease risk factors and C-reactive protein (CRP) in
people who have completed a 500-mile, 30-day pilgrimage. As Harris
explains, elevated levels of CRP are an early marker of cardiovascular
disease risk and a sign of possible inflammation, identifiable by a
blood-sample analysis.

As Harris explains, the pilgrimage sounds at first like a low-intensity
activity, and there is not much information in the medical literature
about it except for problems with heat stress, heat stroke and the
spread of communicable diseases.

"I did some calculations in terms of energy expenditure. How much
energy do you expend walking five to six hours a day under those
conditions? It turned out that there's about an extra 2,500 calories a
day, so we're talking about doubling your energy needs for each day.
That's roughly equivalent to running a marathon every day for an entire
month in terms of the amount of energy used," Harris says.

Wolf's main logistical problem during her independent study had to do
with collection of the data-obtaining approvals to do studies on human
subjects, making arrangements for the pre- and post-pilgrimage blood
work both in the United States and in Spain and also getting an
estimation of the participants' cardiovascular fitness and body
composition.

However, her biggest contribution to the project is going on the trip
herself. She will be able to download the data from the heart-rate
monitors to her laptop computer, and she actually needs to do that
frequently because the monitors will hold only so much data in the
memory, depending on the interval between collections of the data.

Once the students come back, all the data will be analyzed and used to
form useful conclusions regarding the pilgrimage as a physical
challenge.

"Hopefully, that will lead to a bigger study in the future, possibly
with some older subjects, because part of the program is to study
aging. We intend to collect data on exactly how physiologically
stressful a pilgrimage is, and that applies not only to the people who
want to go on pilgrimages in the future but also to people with
cardiovascular disease factors looking for ways to control them,"
Harris says.